Design Inspiration: My Big Black Book

I’m a happily married man with no need for a little black book. I do have a big black book that I use on a regular basis. Last week I talked about the need to take a step away from the computer screen and take time to think about design without technical limitations and preconceptions. My big black book is something I use to inspire myself.

What’s The Deal?

It’s really a very simple idea. Website designers don’t need to take all their inspiration from online sources. If they did then all our designs would be derivative and generic. We should be taking inspiration from every medium we can lay our hands on.

Magazines, newspapers, brochures, business cards, etc. There’s a wealth of great design material in print. Of course there are books specifically published to provide design inspiration, but the more eclectic your source the more inspiration you can find. My big black book is a scrapbook. A scrapbook of images, headlines, photographs and other material that I’ve seen and thought was interesting.

Don’t Think About It Too Much

The idea is that my scrapbook is based on gut reaction. If I see a great picture then I’ll keep the magazine I found it in, or tear out the page, so that I can paste it into my scrapbook later. It means that I always have a memory of those little things that I saw and thought “that looks cool.”

The scrapbook is not something that I make a specific effort to work on. The idea is not to keep looking for material to put in the scrapbook. The idea is to give me somewhere where I can put the great design I stumble across when I’m doing other things. It’s for the great design that I find when I’m not thinking about design myself.

Kick Starting The Creative Process

Since I started the book and it’s grown, I use it right at the start of any assignment. There’s no particular layout to the scrapbook, it’s not arranged into sections or themes. Instead it’s a jumble of creative material that I simply spend some time flicking through while I think about the design job I’m going to be doing.

It works great in two ways. Sometimes I’ll come across an image that I think really speaks to my brief. In which case I can use that and develop a design around it, using aspects of that image in the scrapbook to directly guide the design. Even if that isn’t the case, however, simply looking through all the images works really well to get my mind thinking in a creative way. It often leads to me feeling inspired even if there was nothing specific in the book that I’m going to use in my design.

Whether it’s a scrapbook like mine, an envelope filled with cuttings, or a huge wall montage, this kind of design inspiration is both fun to put together and a great help in promoting creative thinking to help your design goals.